Andrés Cendales ^1* Hugo Guerrero ² Laura Oñate ³

• ¹ University of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia
• ² Militar University of New Granada, Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia
• ³ Universidad del Norte, Colombia, Barranquilla, Colombia

This article presents a model of political competition in which political parties, using clientelism, compete for control of seats in the legislature. Political parties exercise political violence to prevent potential rivals from accessing power and threatening their position in the hybrid political regime. The theory suggests that the degree of political violence exerted by ruling parties in hybrid regimes will increase as they concentrate more power in the legislature. This enables us to explain why hybrid regimes exhibit lower levels of political violence compared to autocratic regimes, contrary to the inverted-U relationship theory. Furthermore, the model can account for structural trends towards lower levels of political violence in hybrid regimes. The study uses the methodology of analytical narratives, using Colombia's hybrid regime as a case study, and employs an autoregressive vector model to verify the model's predictions using time series data spanning the years 1946 to 2014.